We were delighted to welcome Niall Ferguson, one of those rare historians who is equally brilliant investigating the past, and analyzing the present. The author of the superb Ascent of Money and The House of Rothschild probes with his customary clarity and acuity the relationships between Jews and finance, and anti-Semitism and financial crises, topics especially pertinent now.

With access to 10,000 letters and a wealth of previously unpublished material, Niall Ferguson’s compelling biography: High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg took 12 years to write. Amassing a personal fortune of a mere £2,000,000, Warburg was not an exceptionally wealthy man even by the standards of his day, in the sense of “megabucks”. Deriving from an epoch where banking was stillrelationship-driven “haute banque”, rather than our era of abstract finance a...